Ordering products over the internet for home delivery is an extremely popular way of shopping. Fulfilling such orders in a timely, accurate and efficient manner is logistically challenging to say the least. Clicking the “check out” button in a virtual shopping cart creates an “order.” The order includes a listing of items that are to be shipped to a particular address. The process of “fulfillment” involves physically taking or “picking” these items from a large warehouse, packing them, and shipping them to the designated address. An important goal of the order-fulfillment process is thus to ship as many items in as short a time as possible.
Among the tasks of order fulfillment is therefore that of traversing the warehouse to find and collect the various items listed in a customer order. Certain order-fulfillment processes use only human operators to pick and place goods. Often the human operators use carts to assist them in transporting the goods around the warehouse. In other cases, robots are used to increase efficiency and productivity. In both cart-based and robot-based systems, totes or containers may be used to organize the goods being transported. And, in certain cases, a plurality of individual totes or containers may be interconnected to form a tote array to organize the goods for multiple orders.
To ensure they are lightweight while being sufficiently durable, the totes may be formed of a rigid polyofelin plastic material, such as polyethylene. In order to adequately secure each tote to an adjacent tote, a relatively strong adhesive, such as LocTite 3035, has been used. However, separating totes that have been adhered using glue often results in the hard plastic material of the totes breaking. Therefore, it has been found that separating the individual totes from the tote arrays for reuse/reconfiguration is generally not possible. This is a less than desirable result and a secure, convenient, and easy way to interconnect totes which may be later disconnected (for reuse/reconfiguration) without destroying or damaging the totes is needed.